Chu Chin Chow

"Scented hogwash" was Herbert Beerbohm Tree's description of this famous 1916 musical. Maybe that was sour grapes, since Oscar Asche's show occupied His Majesty's - the theatre Tree built for his own Shakespeare productions - for a record-busting 2,238 performances.

Watching Alex Sutton's low-budget revival, however, one can't help feeling Tree had a point. The show wallows in the exotic orientalism that was later to yield the equally kitschy Kismet.

Based on the Arabian Nights tale of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, the show is pure hokum from start to finish. It has to do with a robber sheikh who poses as a Chinese despot and is outwitted by his beautiful captive, who contrives the scheme whereby his predatory band are doused in boiling oil. But Asche's absurdly complex plot is filled with "yea verily" dialogue, as if everyone in old Baghdad spoke in biblical tongues.

The chief pleasure lies in Frederic Norton's gift for writing comic songs. Most of these fall to Ali Baba, typically described as "the wine-bibbing babbler of Baghdad", and played by Alan Cox in a vein of roguish camp that keeps the party going.

How does one explain the show's phenomenal public appeal? The answer, I suspect, is that it offered battle-weary troops lavish spectacle and hordes of scantily clad slave-girls. Deprived of these, Sutton's production has to fall back on musical values. Fortunately, the show's 23 numbers are zestfully played by Leigh Thompson's five-piece band and punchily delivered by the 12-strong cast. But it seems fitting that the musical's most famous number falls to a Baghdad shoemaker, since the whole show is a load of oriental cobblers.